What art can do that a policy brief cannot
Artivism is a new strand of the Empath Alliance's work. This is why we started it and what it has made.
A policy brief arrives by email, is opened, skimmed, and joins the others. This is not a criticism of policy briefs. We write them, we need them, and they do work that nothing else does. But anyone who has spent a decade handing paper to people with power knows their limits. A brief tells a decision-maker something; it rarely makes them stand still.
In restrictive contexts, the obstacle is rarely a shortage of information. Policy makers and the people they serve already know what unsafe abortion costs, what happens to a girl who cannot get contraception and what the law does and does not permit. The real obstacle is stigma and the habit of looking away.
Art moves in that exact space. A piece of work made by someone who carries the experience does not argue with the room; it puts something in front of people and waits.
This matters more now than it did five years ago. We live in a world where language is increasingly machine-generated, and access to artificial intelligence tools is proliferating fast. It is hard to imagine advocacy and policy language staying immune. When a position paper can be produced in seconds, and when every reader knows it, the words on the page carry less than they used to. What cannot be generated is a thing a person made with their hands about something that happened to them. The search for more tactile and distinctly human ways to communicate is not a nostalgic preference. It is becoming an urgent practical one.
Twelve weeks
Earlier this year, we ran a twelve-week artivism programme with activists from Alliance partner organisations across Nigeria and Cameroon: counsellors, community mobilisers, youth organisers and programme staff. Some have creative training or hold communications responsibilities, but none would describe themselves as artists.
Central to the programme was a six-step peer review method, borrowed from art school and pointed at advocacy. Look in silence. Describe only what is visible. Read what the work is saying, and to whom, while the artist stays quiet and writes it down. Test it. Push it, one suggested change each, always offered as a question. Then the artist speaks last and decides what they will do next.
Underneath the making sit four questions that every participant has now answered a dozen times over. Who must see this? What must they feel or do? What form will it take? What materials, and why?
Read those again. They are not really questions about art. They are the questions any serious advocacy plan has to answer, asked in a form that will not let anyone hide behind a workplan. Audience, objective, channel, resource.
Why this is a strand and not a project
Three reasons anchor this in our permanent work:
The capability stays. Partners who have run a crit can run one again, in their own organisation, with their own teams, without us in the room. That is the same logic we apply to every other kind of capacity we build: the point is what remains when the funding period closes.
It produces work that lasts. Advocacy generates a great deal of material that is read once and filed. This produces work that travels: hung in a hall in Abuja, photographed, printed, shown again in another city, put in front of a funder or a minister two years from now.
It convenes. Activists from across West and Central Africa have worked together in English and in French, looking at each other's unfinished work and arguing about it honestly. That is a different kind of relationship from the one built by sitting through the same webinar.
"When I started, I wasn't completely sure how I would interpret the feminist side of SRHR through art as a man. I looked for the parts I could connect with and express honestly: freedom, resilience and autonomy. For my photography I am using my mother as my muse. She had shared stories of how her own mother used to secretly seek family planning against the approval of my grandfather, and how she sometimes helped hide the medications.
The crits made me realise I could not just focus on whether I liked an image. The squint test especially made me step back and ask what was actually coming through when the physical details became less important."
Damilola Danbaba, Communication Officer, Center for Bridging Health Gaps (CBHGaps)
Bodies of Evidence
Abuja, 11 November
Bodies of Evidence opens at Harriet Tubman Hall in Abuja on Wednesday 11 November, on the eve of the Empath Alliance regional meeting.
Alliance partners from across the region will be in the building already. Alongside them we are inviting members of the National Assembly and the wider political world, the office of the FCT Minister, the office of the Presidency, the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, embassies, the coalitions we work with and civil society colleagues from across Nigeria.
Rather than a programme of speeches, the evening centres on discovery. Guests meet the work first, form their own impression, and then turn to the artist standing beside it. The artist has about two minutes to say what the work is and to ask for one thing. Every crit between now and November is practice for that two minutes, and it is probably the most useful advocacy training any of us have run.
The work will be published online afterwards, so that it keeps doing its job long after the hall empties.
If you would like to come
Formal invitations go out this month. If you are in Abuja, please join us. And if you know someone who should be in that room, write to us and we will make sure they are invited.
If you fund this kind of work, we want to run a second cohort and to make a Cameroonian version of the show. We are no longer describing an idea. There are twelve weeks delivered, a body of work made and a hall booked.
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